MORTALITY AND MERCY IN
VIENNA

_Epoch_ (Cornell Univ.) Spring, 1959.

by Tom Pynchon

Just as Siegel got to the address Rachel had given him it started to
rain again. All day rain clouds had hung low and ragged-edged over
Washington, ruining the view from the top of the Monument for the
high-school kids on their senior trips, sending brief squalls which
drove tourists squealing and cursing in to find shelter, dulling the
delicate pink of the cherry blossoms shich had just come out. The
address was a small apartment building on a quiet street near
Dupont Circle, and Siegel dove into the lobby, in out of the rain,
clutching the fifth of scotch he was carrying as if it were a state secret.
There had been times--during the past year, in the Avenue Kleber or
the Viale delle Terme di Caracalla--where there had been a brief case
where the fifth was now, clutched under the same tweed-clad arm
against rain or a deadline or some bureaucratic necessity. And most
of these times, especially if he were hung over from the night before,
or if a girl fellow junior diplomats had sworn was a sure thing had
turned out to be so much more than sure that in the end it had not
been worth even the price of drinks, he would shake his head like a
drunk who is trying to stop seeing double, having become suddenly
conscious of the weight of the briefcase and the insignificance of its
contents and the stupidity of what he was doing out here, away from
Rachel, following an obscure but clearly-marked path through a
jungle of distrainments and affadavits and depositions; wondering
why, in his first days with the Commission, he should have ever
regarded himself as any kind of healer when he had always known
that for a healer--a prophet actually, because if you cared about it at
all you had to be both--there is no question of balance sheets or legal
complexity, and the minute you become involved with anything like
that you are something less; a doctor, or a fortune-teller. When he
was thirteen, a little less than a month after his bar mitzvah, his
cousin Miriam had died of cancer and perhaps it was then--sitting
shivah on an orange crate in a darkened room high over the
Grand Concourse, gaunt and looking a little like a John Buchan hero
even at thirteen, gazing fixedly at the symbolic razor slash halfway
up his black necktie that this awareness had begun to grow, because
he still remembered Miriam's husband cursing Zeit the doctor, and
the money wasted on the operations, and the whole AMA, crying
unashamed in this dim hot room with the drawn shades; and it had
so disquieted young Siegel that when his brother Mike had gone
away to Yale to take pre-med he had been afraid that something
would go wrong and that Mike whom he loved would turn out to be
only a doctor, like Zeit, and be cursed someday too by a distraught
husband in rent garments, in a twilit bedroom. He would stand,
therefore, out in some street, not moving, hanging on to the briefcase
and thinking about Rachel who was 4' 10" in her stocking feet, whose
neck was pale and sleek, a Modigliani neck, whose eyes were not
mirror images but both slanted the same way, dark brown almost to
fathomlessness, and after awhile he would drift up to the surface
again and be annoyed with himself for worrying about these things
when the data inside the briefcase should have been at the office
fifteen minutes ago; and realize, reluctantly, that the racing against
time, the awareness of being a cog, the elan--almost roguery of the
playboy element in the Commission which went well with his British
staff officer appearance--even the intradepartmental scheming and
counterscheming which went on in jazz cellars at two in the morning,
in pensions over brandy and soda, were, after all, exciting. It was
only when he forgot to take vitamin B pills the night before to ward
off a hangover that these funky periods would come at all. Most of
the time the brighteyed and busy tailed Siegel would assert himself
and then he would look on the funky days as only brief aberrations.
Because when you came down to it it was fun to manoeuvre. In the
army he had lived by a golden rule of Screw the Sergeant before He
Screweth Thee; later in college he had forged meal tickets, instigated
protest riots and panty raids, manipulated campus opinion through
the school newspaper; and this was the part of him inherited from a
mother who at the age of 19 had struggled with her soul one night in
a railroad flat somewhere in Hell's Kitchen and, half-drunk on
bootleg beer, had ended up refuting Aquinas and quitting the Roman
church; who would grin fondly at her husband and refer to him as an
innocent slob who never had a chance against her female cunning,
and advise Seigel never to marrv a schickseh but to find himself some
nice quiet Jewish girl because at least there you were given a running
start. For this his roommate at college sophomore year had called him
Stephen and taunted him mercilessly about the still small Jesuit voice
which kept him from being either kicked around or conscious of guilt
or simply ineffective like so many of the other Jewish boys on campus
seemed to Grossmann to be. "Also, Grossmann," Siegel had retorted,
"it perhaps saves me from being a schmuck like you." Grossmann
would laugh and stick his nose back in a textbook. "It is the seed of
your destruction," he would murmur. "House divided against itself?
You know." Well, here he was, 30 and on the way to becoming a
career man, and not particularly aware of destruction mainly because
he was unable to give it a name or a face, unless they were Rachel's
and this he doubted. With the bottle under his arm he climbed up
two flights of stairs, the few raindrops which had caught him
glistening in the shaggy tangle of his tweed coat. He hoped she had
said sevenish--he was pretty sure but it would be awkward if he
arrived too early. He rang the buzzer in front of a door that said 3F
and waited. It seemed to be quiet inside and he was just beginning to
wonder if maybe she hadn't said eightish when the door opened and
a wild-looking, rangy man with fierce eyebrows, wearing a tweed
coat and carrying what looked like a pig foetus under one arm, stood
staring at him, an empty room behind him, and Siegel, annoyed,
realized he had goofed and that 30 years was a long time and that
this might be a first indication of senility. They faced each other like
slightly flawed mirror images--different patterns of tweed, scotch
bottle and pig foetus but no discrepancy in height --with Siegel
experiencing a mixed feeling of discomfort and awe, and the word
Doppelganger had just floated into his mind when the other's
eyebrows shot up into twin parabolas and he stuck out his free hand
and said, "You're early but come in. I'm David Lupescu."

Siegel shook hands, muttering his own name and the spell broke;
he looked at the object under Lupescu's arm and saw that it really
was a pig foetus, caught the faint scent of formaldehyde and
scratched his head. "I brought some booze" he said. "I'm sorry about
this, I'd thought Rachel said seven." Lupescu smiled vaguely and
closed the door behind him. "Don't worry about it," he said, "I've got
to put this thing someplace." He motioned Siegel to a seat and picked
up an old-fashioned glass from a table, a chair from nearby, dragged
the chair to the entrance of what Siegel presumed was the kitchen,
stood on the chair, took a thumbtack from his pocket, stuck it through
the umbilical cord of the pig foetus and tacked it onto the molding
over the entrance, hammering with the bottom of the glass. He
jumped down off the chair and above him the foetus swung
dangerously. He looked up at it. "I hope it stays there," he said, and
then turned to face Siegel. "Fetching, isn't it?" Siegel shrugged.
"Dada exhibit in Paris on Christmas eve, 1919," Lupescu said, "used
one in place of mistletoe. But ten to one this group won't even notice
it. You know Paul Brennan? He won't."

"I don't know anybody," Siegel said, "I've been sort of out of
touch. I just got back from overseas last week. All the old crowd
seems to have drifted away."

Lupescu stuck his hands in his pockets and looked around the
room. brooding. "I know," he said grimly. "Big turnover. But the
types are constant." He moved toward the kitchen, glanced in, paced
back again to the French windows, then suddenly turned and shot
out a forefinger at Siegel. "You," he almost roared. "Of course. You're
perfect." He advanced toward Siegel menacingly, stood looming over
him. "Good grief," Siegel said, cowering a little. "Mon semblable,"
Lupescu said, "mon frere." He gazed at Siegel. "A sign," he said, "a
sign, and deliverance." Siegel could smell alcohol fumes on Lupescu's
breath. "I beg your pardon," Siegel said. Lupescu began pacing
around the room.

"Only a matter of time," he said. "Tonight. Of course. Why. Why
not. Pig foetus. Symbol. God, what a symbol. And now. Freedom-
Deliverance," he screamed. "Genie. Bottle. Century after century, until
Siegel, fisher of souls, pulls the cork." He began running around the
room. "Raincoat," he said, picking a raincoat up off the sofa, "shaving
gear." He disappeared into the kitchen for a moment, came out with
an overnight kit in his hands wearing the raincoat. He paused at the
door. "It's all yours," he said. "You are now the host. As host you are a
trinity: (a) receiver of guests--" ticking them off on his fingers--"(b) an
enemy and (c) an outward manifestation, for them, of the divine body
and blood."

"Wait a minute," Siegel said, "where the hell are you going?"

"The outside," Lupescu said, "out of the jungle."

"But look, hey, I can't make this. I don't know any of these
people."

"All part of it," Lupescu said airily. "You'll pick it up fast enough,"
and was through the door and out before Siegel could think of an
answer. Ten seconds later the door opened again and Lupescu stuck
his head in and winked. "Mistah Kurtz--he dead," he announced
owlishly and disappeared. Siegel sat staring at the foetus. "Well now,
what the hell," he said slowly. He stood up and strolled across the
room to where the phone was and dialed Rachel's number. When she
answered he said, "Fine friends you have."

"Where are you?" she said. "I just got back." Siegel explained.
"Well I'm glad you called," Rachel said. "I called your place and you
weren't in. I wanted to tell you, Sally's brother-in-law's sister, a
winsome little brat of fourteen, just blew into town from some girls'
school in Virginia and Sally is out with Jeff so Iv'e got to stay here
and entertain her till Sally gets back, and by the time I'm able to get
away the liquor will be all gone: I know Lupescu's parties."

"Oh for god's sake," Siegel said irritably, "this is ridiculous. If
Lupescu's friends are anything like him this place is about to be
invaded by a horde of raving lunatics, none of whom I know. And
now you're not even coming."

"Oh it's a nice crowd," she said. " A little curious maybe but
I think you'll like them. You ought to stay." The door was suddenly
and violently kicked open and through it lurched a fat florid
adolescent in a sailor suit, carrying a girl piggy-back. "Lewpayskew,"
the sailor shouted. "Whay aw yew, yew mothuh-lovin Roumanian."

"Hold on," Siegel said. "What was that again," he asked the sailor,
who had deposited his passenger on the floor. "Mayun ah said
whay's Lewpayskew," the sailor said. "God," he babbled into the
phone, "they're coming, they're filtering in already. What do I do,
Rachel, they can't even talk English. There is some nautical looking
type here who is speaking no language known to man."

"Darling," Rachel laughed, "stop acting like a war flick. That's
probably only Harvey Duckworth, who comes from Alabama and
has a charming southern accent. You'll get along wonderfully, I know
you will. Call me tomorrow and let me know everything that has
happened."

"Wait," Siegel said desperately, but she had already said
"Bye-bye," and hung up. He stood there holding the dead receiver.
Harvey Duckworth was stomping around in the other rooms, yelling
for Lupescu; and the girl, who was very young and had long black
hair and big hoop earrings and was wearing a sweatshirt and levis --
who seemed to Siegel a perfect parody of the girl bohemian of the
'40's--stood up and looked at Siegel. "I want to go to bed with you,"
she intoned dramatically and all at once Siegel cheered up. He put
the receiver back on the hook and smiled. "I'm sorry," he said
suavely, "but statutory rape and all that, you know. Can I get you a
drink?"

He went into the kitchen without waiting for an answer and
found Duckworth sitting on the sink trying to open a wine bottle. The
cork popped out suddenly and the bottle slipped and Chianti
splashed all over Duckworth's whites. "Gaw damn," Duckworth said,
staring at the purple stain. "Mizzable Guineas can't even make wahn
bottles raht." The buzzer rang and Siegel called, "Get that would you,
beautiful," and picked the Chianti bottle up off the floor. "Still some
more." he said cheerfully. He was beginning to feel jovial,
irresponsibly so; a lightheadedness which he realized might be one of
the first stages of hysteria but which he rather hoped was some
vestige of the old nonchalance which had sustained him on the
Continent for the past two years. In the other room he heard what
sounded like a chorus of roaring boys, chanting dirty limericks. The
girl came in and said, "My god, it's Brennan and his friends."

"Oh goodo," Siegel said. "They seem to be in fine voice." Indeed,
they were. In his suddenly amiable state it seemed to Siegel that this
account of the young fellow named Cheever who had an affair with a
beaver took on Deeper Human Significance, was gilded with a certain
transcendental light which reminded him of that final trio from Faust,
where the golden stairs come down and Margarethe ascends to
heaven. "Really lovely," he mused. The girl looked with disgust at
Duckworth and then smiled brightly at Siegel. "By the way," she said,
"I'm Lucy."

"Hi," Siegel said. "My name is Cleanth but my friends call me
Siegel, out of pity."

"Where's David anyway. I ought to give him hell for inviting that
oaf Brennan."

Siegel pursed his lips. Hell, this was impossible. He had to trust
somebody. He took her hand and led her into the bedroom and sat
her down on a bed. "No," he said quickly. "Not what you're thinking."
He told her about Lupescu's sudden departure and she shrugged and
said, "Maybe it was a good thing. He would have cracked sooner or
later, he was going native."
"

That's a strange way to put it," Siegel said. After all, going native
in Washington, D.C.? In more exotic places, certainly, he had seen
that. He remembered a Peter Arno cartoon in the New Yorker he had
always liked, showing a girl in Apache costume, sitting on the lap of
a depraved-looking Frenchman in a sidewalk cafe; and the girl's
friend, obviously an American tourist, armed with camera,
shoulder-bag and guidebook, saying, with a scandalized expression,
"But Mary Lou, you mean you're not going back to Bryn Mawr,
ever?" Still, stranger things had happened. In the two semesters he
spent at Harvard Siegel had witnessed the gradual degeneration of
his roommate Grossmann, a proud and stubborn native of Chicago
who denied the presence of any civilization outside of Cook County
and for whom Boston was worse even than Oak Park, was in fact, a
sort of apotheosis of the effete and the puritan. Grossmann had
remained unmarred, majestically sneering, happy-go-lucky, until one
Christmas eve he and Siegel and some friends and a group of
Radcliffe girls had gone carolling on
Beacon hill.

Whether it was the booze they had brought along or the fact that
Grossmann had just finished reading not only Santayana's The
Last Puritan but also a considerable amount of T. S. Eliot--and so
might have been a little more susceptible to tradi tion in general and
to Christmas eve on Beacon hill in particular --or merely the
bothersome tendency Grossman had to get sentimental in the
company of Radcliffe girls, he had still been touched enough to
inform Siegel later on that night that maybe there were a few human
beings in Boston after all. And this had been the first tiny rent in that
Midwestern hauteur which he had carried up to now as a torero
carries his cape; after that night it was all downhill. Grossmann
took to strolling in the moonlight with only the most patrician of
Radcliffe and Wellesley girls; he discovered a wonderful make-out
spot down behind the minute man statue in Concord; he began
carrying a black umbrella and gave away all his loud clothes,
substituting flawless and expensive tweeds and worsteds. Siegel was
mildly disturbed at all this but it was not until one afternoon in the
early spring, when he entered their rooms at Dunster and surprised
Grossmann standing in front of the mirror, umbrella under one arm,
eyebrows raised superciliously and nose ached loftily, reciting "I
parked my car in Harvard yard," over and over, that he was struck
with the extent of his roommate's dissipation.

The strong nasal r's Siegel had secretly admired there now
eneverated and pallid; and in that classic shibboleth, Siegel
recognized poor, innocent Grossmann's swan song. A year later
Siegel got a letter, the last: Grossmann had married a Wellesley girl
and they were living in Swampscott. Sit tibi terra levis,
Grossmann. But Siegel wondered how in the hell it was possible for
anyone to sink roots in a town at once as middle class and as
cosmopolitan as Washington. You could become bourgeois or one of
the international set but this could happen in any city. Unless it had
nothing to do with the place at all and was a question of compulsion-
-unless there was something which linked people like Gaugin and
Eliot and Grossmann, some reason which gave them no other choice;
and this was why, when it had happened in Boston and now maybe
even in Washington, for god's sake, Siegel felt uneasy and unwilling
to think about it too much.

This little Jesuit thing, this poltergeist, would start kicking
around inside his head
just as it had done with the briefcase, and call him back to the real
country where there were drinks to be mixed and bon mots
to be tossed out carelessly and maybe a drunk or two to take care of.
It was doing that now. So all he did was look at Lucy quizically and
say, "Well I don't know. He seemed sort of under the weather. Also
maybe a little neurotic."

The girl laughed softly, not trying for rapport any more, not
even the bedroom kind; but anxious now for thoughts of her own
which Siegel was neither ready to be curious about nor confident he
would be able to cope with. "A little neurotic," she said, "is like being
a little bit pregnant. You don't know David. He's well, Siegel, he's the
only one of us who is." Siegel smiled. "I shouldn't talk," he said, "I'm a
stranger. Look Lucy, would you help me out a little with this group?"

"Me help you?" Suddenly weak, she answered with
something that was so curiously both impotence and scorn that he
began to wonder how well she was herself. "All right, I'll make a deal.
Mutual aid. The truth is I need a shoulder to cry on." Siegel threw a
quick glance behind him out into the kitchen, a glance which she
caught. "Don't worry about them," she smiled, "they'll take care of
themselves for awhile. They know where the liquor is and
everything." Siegel smiled in apology, pushed the door shut and
settled back on the bed next to her, resting on one elbow.

A Klee original was on the wall facing them; two crossed BAR's,
hunting rifles and a few sabres hung around the other walls. The
room was sparsely furnished in Swedish modern and carpeted wall
to wall. He looked down at her and said, "OK, cry away."

"I don't really know why I should be telling you about this," she
began and it was as if she bad said. "Bless me father for I have
sinned," because Siegel often thought that if all the punks, lushes,
coeds in love, woebegone PFC's--the whole host of trodden-on and
disaffected--who had approached him with that opening formula
were placed end to end they would surely reach from here back to
the Grand Concourse and a timid spindleshanked boy in a slashed
necktie "Except," she continued, "that you look like David, you have
the same kind of sympathy for anybody who gets kicked around, I
feel that somehow." Siegel shrugged. "Anyway," she said, "it's
Brennan. Brennan and that bitch Considine."

And she went on to tell how apparentlv this female economics
expert named Debby Considine had returned a week ago from an
expedition to Ontario and right away Paul Brennan had started
chasing her again. There was a tree outside her apartment house on P
St. and Brennan had climbed up this tree and waited for her to collie
out and whenever she did he would proclaim his passion for her in
loud and improvised blank verse. Usually a small crowd would
collect and finally one night the cops came with ladders and hauled
him down and dragged him away.

"And who does he call to come down to the precinct to bail him
out," Lucy said. "Me, is who. Right before payday too. The bastard
still hasn't paid me back. And to make matters worse he already had
a record. Krinkles Porcino, that's Paul's roommate, got engaged to
this girl Monica back around February. The two kids were really in
love, and Paul was fond of both of them, so that when Sybil--she was
living with David at the time--started running after Krinkles and
threatening to break the thing up--well anyway she finally threw this
big bitch scene with Paul in the lobby of the Mayflower and Paul
ended up slugging her with a vodka bottle he happened to be
carrying, and they got him for assault. And of course David had a
bad time of it because he hates to get involved in anything, but Sam
Fleischmann, who's hated Paul's guts ever since Paul sold him $100
worth of phony uranium stock, felt so sorry for David that he started
writing poison pen letters to Sybil, dumping all over Paul. He'd write
them in the morning right after we got up, while I made breakfast,
and we'd both laugh and laugh because it was so much fun."

"Oh," Siegel said, "ha, ha."

"And then when Paul got out," she went on, "what should
happen but Harvey had to fly into a rage at Paul because he knew I
was in love with Paul and was sending him cigarettes and cookies
and things while he was in stir, and he chased Paul for seven blocks
through the theatre district one night with a boatswain's knife. That
was sort of funny too because Harvey was in uniform and it took four
SP's finally to bring him down, and even then he broke the arm of
one of them and sent another to Bethesda Naval Hospital with severe
abdominal wounds. So Paul is out on bail now and threatening to get
Monica because she's living with Sam but what the hell else can she
do when Krinkles has been out of town for weeks trving to kick the
habit and all. The trouble is that damn junkie doesn't know how
really good she is, Siegel. She pawned Krinkles' baritone sax
only a couple of days ago because poor Sam had just lost his job at
the Smithsonian and was actually starving before she found out
about it and took him in. The girl's a saint."

She went on in the same way for fifteen minutes more, layng
bare, like a clumsy brain surgeon, synapses and convolutions which
should never have been exposed, revealing for Siegel the anatomy of
a disease more serious than he had suspected: the badlands of the
heart, in which shadows, and crisscrossed threads of inaccurate
self-analysis and Freudian fallacy, and passages where the
light and perspective were tricky, all threw you into that heightened
hysterical edginess of the sort of nightmare it is possible to have
where your eyes are open and everything in the scene is familiar, yet
where, flickering behind the edge of the closet door, hidden under
the chair in the corner, is this je ne sais quoi de sinistre which
sends you shouting into wakefulness.

Until finally one of Brennan's friends, whom Lucy introduced
as Vincent, wandered in and informed them that somebody had
already walked through the French windows without opening them;
and Siegel realized wearily that it was going to be that kind of a
party, and having committed himself anyway by the very act of lying
next to a girl he did not know and playing the role of crying towel for
half an hour, resolved in true British staff officer style to bite the jolly
old bullet and make the best of a bad job.

In the kitchen were a couple seated on the sink making out;
Duckworth, horribly drunk, lying on the floor and hurling pistachio
nuts at the pig foetus; and a group of four or five people in Bermuda
shorts sitting in a circle playing Prince. In the other room somebody
had put on a cha cha record and a few couples were improvising
freely. Presumably intelligent talk flickered around the room with the
false brightness of heat lightning: in the space of a minute Siegel
caught the words "Zen," "San Francisco," and "Wittgenstein," and felt
a mild sense of disappointment, almost as if he had expected some
esoteric language, something out of Albertus Magnus. Beside the pig
foetus there was only one other really incongruous note in the whole
scene: a swarthy looking person in torn khakis and an old corduroy
coat who stood in one corner like some memento mori, withdrawn
and melancholy. "That's Considine's latest," Lucy said, "an Indian she
brought back from Ontario. Boy, what a hunk."

"He looks sad," Siegel said. Somebody handed Siegel an
ambiguous mixture in an old-fashioned glass and he sipped it
automatically, grimaced and set it down. "His name is Irving Loon,"
she said dreamily.

"Irving what?" said Siegel.

"Loon. He's Ojibwa. Oh there's Paul. Talking to Considine the
bastard." She led him over to a corner where a diminutive junior
executive type was eagerly haranguing this serpentine brunette with
heavily mascaraed eyes. At his first glimpse of Debby Considine
Siegel drew in a low whistle and let the four fingers of his left hand
wobble to and for a few times, forgetting about Irving Loon, Prince
players and drunken sailors. '"Marrone," he whispered. Lucy
glared at him. "Not you too," she said furiously. "Goddamn all these
sex machines." He was introduced and after awhile Lucy managed to
haul Brennan away on some pretext or other and Siegel was left alone
with the lady economist.

"And how were the boondocks of Ontario," he said. She looked at
him from under lowered lashes. "So fascinating," she murmured in a
husky, detached voice. "Do you know the Ojibwa?" Seigel began
flipping over a stack of mental IBM cards frantically. There was
something he knew, something he had had in college. It irritated him
not to be able to call the information up because most of the courses
he had taken had served no other function--at least such had been his
undergraduate protests--than to provide material for conversation at
parties like this one. Ojibwa Indians. Somewhere in Ontario.
Something weird, even funny, but he was damned if he could pin it
down.

"You look compassionate," Debby said suddenly. "Is there
somewhere we can talk?" and Siegel, pulled away from the IBM
cards, thought Jesus Christ, here we go again. He led her into the
bedroom, which was beginning to look like some
perversely-decorated confessional, and wondered whether this had
been David Lupescu's place for listening to bent souls. He had a
hunch it was. She stood close to him and played with his Challis tie
and gave him the demure bit with the eyelashes again. "You're the
same," she whispered, "you have this monumental Lupescu coolness.
You're sure you're not his doubleganger."

"For the moment a father confessor. What seems to be your
trouble, my child."

"It's Irving Loon," she said, sitting on the bed and playing with
the empty highball glass she had brought in with her, ignoring the
irony, "he was so happy back in Ontario. At ricing time, you see, all
the families are together, everyone happy, Togetherness in Ojibwa
land. Blasts, brawls, sex orgies, community sings, puberty rituals. All
kinds of wonderful local color to fill up notebook after notebook
with. And Irving Loon, ten feet tall with fists like rocks and enough
to make even a jaded heart like mine uneasy." Then, surprisingly--
and, for Siegel, embarrassingly--she began reeling off a list of the
affairs she had had in all the underdeveloped areas she had visited
for the State Dept.; several pages of unofficial statistics which
sounded a little like the Catalogue aria from Don Giovanni.

It seemed she had this habit of picking up male specimens
wherever she went and bringing them back with her and dropping
them after a few weeks. Her exes either assimilated in with The
Group or found a niche in some other group or dropped out of sight
completely and forever. But Irving Loon, she insisted, was different.
He had this brooding James Dean quality about him.

"He's been standing in the same corner all evening," she said. "He
hasn't spoken a word for two days. I feel--" and her eyes gazed over
Siegel's shoulder, out into god knows where "that it's not only
nostalgia for the wilderness, but almost as if somehow out there, in
the hinterlands, with nothing but snow and forests and a few beaver
and moose, he has come close to something which city dwellers never
find all their lives, may never even be aware exists, and it's this that
he misses, that the city kills or hides from him." I'll be damned,
thought Siegel. This broad is serious. "And this is just what I can't tell
Paul," she sighed. "He makes fun of Irving, calIs him ignorant. But it's
a divine melancholia and it's what I love about him."

Good grief, that was it.

Melancholia. Just by accident she had used that word, the
psychologist's term, instead of "melancholy." Little Professor
Mitchell, perched like a sparrow on his desk in anthropology lecture,
hands in his coat pockets, a permanently sarcastic smile twisting one
side of his mouth, talking about psychopathy among the Ojibwa
Indians. Of course. The old memory bank was still functioning after
all. "You must remember that this group lives forever at the brink of
starvation," Mitchell said in that deprecating, apologetic tone which
implied that for him all cultures were equally mad; it was only the
form that differed, never the content. "It has been said that the Ojibwa
ethos is saturated with anxiety," and simultaneously 50 pens copied
the sentence verbatim.

"The Ojibwa are trained, from childhood, to starve; the male
ehild's entire upbringing is dedicated to a single goal: that of
becoming a great hunter. Emphasis is on isolation, self-sufiiciency.
There is no sentimentality among the Ojibwa. It is an austere and
bleak existence they lead, always one step away from death. Before
he can attain to the state of manhood a boy must experience a vision,
after starving himself for several days. Often after seeing this vision
he feels he has acquired a supernatural companion, and there is a
tendency to identify. Out in the wilderness, with nothing but a
handful of beaver, deer, moose and bear between him and starvation,
for the Ojibwa hunter, feeling as he does at bay, feeling a
concentration of obscure cosmic forces against him and him alone,
cynical terrorists, savage and amoral deities---" this time a smile in
self-reproach--"which are bent on his destruction, the identification
may become complete. When such paranoid tendencies are further
intensified bv the highly competitive life of the summer villages at
ricing and berry-picking time, or bv the curse, perhaps, of a shaman
with some personal grudge, the Ojibwa becomes highly susceptible
to the well-known Windigo psychosis."

Siegel knew about the Windigo, all right. He remembered being
scared out of his wits once at camp by the fireside yarn image of a
mile-high skeleton made of ice, roaring and crashing through the
Canadian wilderness, grabbing up humans by the handful and
feeding on their flesh. But he had outgrown the nightmares of
boyhood enough to chuckle at the professor's description of a
half-famished hunter, already slightly warped, identifying with the
Windigo and turning into a frenzied cannibal himelf, foraging
around the boondocks for more food after he had gorged himself on
the bodies of his immediate family. "Get the picture," he had told
Grossmann that night, over mugs of Wurtzburger. "Altered
perception. Simultaneously, all over god knows how many square
miles, hundreds, thousands of these Indians are looking at each other
out of the corner of their eye and not seeing wives or husbands or
little children at all. What they see is big fat juicy beavers. And these
Indians are hungry, Grossmann. I mean, my gawd. A big mass
psychosis. As far as the eye can reach--" he gestured dramatically--
"Beavers. Succulent, juicy, fat."

"How yummy," Grossmann had commented wryly. Sure, it was
amusing, in a twisted sort of way. And it gave anthropologists
something to write about and people at parties something to talk
about. Fascinating, this Windigo psychosis. And oddly enough its
first stages were marked by a profound melancholia. That was what
had made him remember, a juxtaposition of words, an accident. He
wondered why Irving Loon had not been talking for two days. He
wondered if Debby Considine knew about this area of the Ojibwa
personality.

"And Paul just won't understand," she was saying. "Of course it
was a bitchy thing to complain to the police but I'd lie awake nights,
thinking of him crouched up in that tree, like some evil spirit,
waiting for me. I suppose I've always been a little afraid of
something like that, something unfamiliar, something I couldn't
manipulate. Oh yes," she admitted to his raised eyebrows, "I've
manipulated them all right. I didn't want to, Siegel, god knows I
didn't. But I can't help it." Siegel felt like saying, "Use a little less
mascara or something," but was brought up short by an awareness
which had been at the back of his mind since Lupescu had left: a
half-developed impression about the role Lupescu had occupied for
this group; and it occurred to him that his double would never have
said anything like that. You might give absolution or penance, but no
practical advice. Tucked snugly in some rectory of the mind, Cleanth
Siegel, S.J., looked on with approval. "Changing the subject for a
moment," Siegel said, "do you know, has Irving told you anything
about the Windigo?"

"It's funny you should mention that," she said, "it's a nature god
or something, that they worship. I'm not on the anthropology end of
things or I could tell you more about it. But the last time Irving was
talking--he speaks English so well--he said once 'Windigo,
Windigo, stay by me.' It's this poetic, religious quality in him that's so
touching." And right about here Siegel began to feel really uneasy, to
hear this tiny exasperating dissonance. Poetic? Religious? Ha, ha.

"I'm afraid," she was saying. "I get so depressed, so exhausted.
Even as a little girl I used to be scared of being hit by a meteorite, isn't
that silly? This terror of the unfamiliar, this sort of arbitrary act of god
or something. It got bad, very bad, two years ago and I tried to
straighten everything out with an act of Debby Considine, by taking
rather more than the prescribed amount of Seconal. Then when it
didn't work I rode up on another crest and I've been there for two
years and I guess non I'm about due for a trough again."

Siegel sat up suddenly and glared straight ahead of him, at the
crossed BAR's on the wall. He was getting fed up with this. Lupescu
was wrong: you did not pick this sort of thing up quickly at all. It was
a slow process and dangerous because in the course of things it was
very possible to destroy not only yourself but vour flock as well. He
took her hand. "Come on," he said, "I'd like to
meet Irving. Sav for your penance ten Hail Marys and make a good
Act of Contrition."

"Oh my god," she murmured. "I am heartily sorry . . ." and
apparently she was, but probably only because the interview had
been cut short. They threaded their way between several inert bodies
in the kitchen. The cha cha side had been replaced by Bartok's
Concerto for Orchestra and Siegel smiled grimly because of its
appropriateness; because he knew he could listen to anything else but
this mad Hungarian without getting bugged, but at the sound of an
entire string section run suddenly amok, shrieking like an uprooted
mandrakes trying to tear itself apart, the nimble little Machiavel
inside him would start to throw things at the mensch
who had just cast off adolescence and who still sat perpetual shivall
for people like Debby Considine and Lucy and himself and all the
other dead, trying to goad it into action; and he wondered if perhaps
Lucy's diagnosis of Lupescu's trouble hadn't been correct and if
someday he, Siegel, might not find himself standing in front of some
mirror with a pig foetus under one arm, reciting Freudian cant at
himself to get the proper inflection right.

"Irving Loon," Debby said, "Cleanth Siegel." Irving Loon stood
motionless, seemingly unaware of their presence. Debby put her
hand on the Ojibwa's arm and caressed it. "Irving," she said softly,
"please say something." Damn the torpedoes, Siegel thought. Full
speed ahead. "Windigo," he said quietly and Irving Loon jumped as if
an ice cube had been dropped down his neck. He looked intently at
Siegel, probing suddenly with black, piercing eyes. Then he shifted
his gaze to Debby and smiled wanly. He put his arm around her
waist and nuzzled her cheek. "Debby," he murmured, "my beautiful
little beaver."

"Isn't that sweet," Debby said, smiling over her shoulder at
Siegel. Oh my god, Siegel thought. Oh no. Beaver? Now wait a
minute. Somebody was tugging at Siegel's coat sleeve and he turned
swiftly, nervously, and saw Brennan. "Can I see you alone for a
minute," Brennan said. Siegel hesitated. Irving Loon and Debby were
whispering endearments to one another. "Sure, okay," Siegel said
absently. They crunched over the broken glass from the French
windows and went out on a small balcony, which was just as well,
because Siegel was beginning to get a little sick of the bedroom. The
rain had dwindled to a light mist and Siegel pulled his coat collar up.
"I hear you're a pretty sympathetic guy," Brennan began, "and I guess
you know how it is with me and Debby. The truth is I'm worried
about that Indian."

"So am I," Siegel started to say and then caught himself. This
theory about why Irving Loon was not talking was based only on
suspicion; and this whole absurd, surrealist atmosphere had after all
been working on an imagination known occasionally to go off the
deep end. So instead he said, "I could see where you might." Brennan
turned crafty. "I think he's using hypnosis on her," he confided,
darting quick glances back inside to see if anyone was listening.
Siegel nodded profoundly.

Brennan went on to explain his side of the tree-climbing episode
and by the time he was through Siegel, who had not been paying
attention, was surprised to find, on looking at his watch for the first
time that evening, that it was almost eleven. A few people had left
and the party was showing the first signs of slowing down. Siegel
wandered out into the kitchen where he found half a fifth of scotch,
and made a scotch on the rocks; his first drink, as a matter of fact,
since he had arrived. He stood in the kitchen, alone, trying to assess
things. First stage, melancholia. Second stage, direct violence. How
much had Irving Loon been drinking? How much did starvation
have to do with the psychosis once it got under way? And then the
enormity of it hit him. Because if this hunch were true, Siegel had the
power to work for these parishioners a kind of miracle, to bring them
a very tangible salvation. A miracle involving a host, true, but like no
holy eucharist. He was the only one, besides Irving Loon, who knew.
Also, a sober voice reminded him, he was apparently the only one
who had the Windigo psychosis as his sole piece of information about
the Ojibwa. It might be a case of generalization, there might be any
number of things wrong with Irving Loon. Still, perhaps . . . a case of
conscience.

Vincent came up to him and wanted to talk but he waved him
off. Siegel had had about enough of confessions. He wondered how
his predecessor had managed to remain as father confessor for as
long as he had. It occurred to him now that Lupescu's parting
comment had been no drunken witticism; but that the man really
had, like some Kurtz, been possessed by the heart of a darkness in
which no ivory was ever sent out from the interior, but instead
hoarded jealously by each of its gatherers to build painfully, fragment
by fragment, temples to the glory of some imago or obsession, and
decorated inside with the art work of dream and nightmare, and
locked finally against a hostile forest, each "agent" in his own ivory
tower, having no windows to look out of, turning further and further
inward and cherishing a small flame behind the altar. And Kurtz too
had been in his way a father confessor. Siegel shook his head, trying
to clear it. Somebody had started a crap game in the other room and
Siegel sat down on the kitchen table, swinging one leg, looking in at
the crowd. "Oh you're a fine group," he muttered.

He was beginning to think that maybe he should tell all these
people to go to hell and go drop in on Rachel after all when he saw
Irving Loon come dreamlike in under the pig foetus, eyes staring
straight ahead, unseeing. Siegel, paralyzed, watched Irving Loon go
into the bedroom, drag a chair over to one wall, stand on it, and
unhook one of the BAR's. Rapt, entirely absorbed in what he was
doing, the Indian began rummaging around in the drawers of
Lupescu's desk. Gingerly Siegel edged himself off the table and
tiptoed to the bedroom door. Irving Loon, still singing to himself
produced with a smile a box of .30 caliber ammunition. Happily he
began putting rounds into the magazine. Siegel counted the rounds
as he put them in. The magazine would hold 20. All right, Siegel, he
said to himself, here it is. Moment of truth.

Espada broken, muleta lost, horse
disembowelled, picadors sick with fear. Five in the afternoon, crowd
screaming. Miura bull, sharp horns, charging in. He figured there
were about sixty seconds to make a decision, and now the still small
Jesuit voice, realizing that the miracle was in his hands after all, for
real, vaunted with the same sense of exhiliration Siegel had once felt
seeing five hundred hysterical freshmen advancing on the women's
dorms, knowing it was he who had set it all in motion. And the other,
gentle part of him sang kaddishes for the dead and mourned
over the Jesuit's happiness, realizing however that this kind of
penance was as good as any other; it was just unfortunate that Irving
Loon would be the only one partaking of any body and blood, divine
or otherwise. It took no more than five seconds for the two sides to
agree that there was really only one course to take.

Quietly Siegel strolled back through the kitchen, through the
living room, taking his time, unnoticed by the crap shooters, opened
the door, stepped out into the hall and closed the door behind him.
He walked downstairs, whistling. At the first floor landing, he heard
the first screams, the pounding of footsteps, the smashing of glass. He
shrugged. What the hell, stranger things had happened in
Washington. It was not until he had reached the street that he heard
the first burst of the BAR fire.